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The Lybrook Badlands

story and photos by Michael Richie

Walking the mesa edge in Lybrook Badlands is a trip through a superbly xeriscaped, avant garde sculpture park with exhilarating aerial views. It's also a very sinuous path. Long, thin sandstone fingers stretch out across crumbling grey hoodoo galleries. The colorful sandstone rim itself sports the most diverse collection of precariously balanced, red cap-rocked hoodoos I've seen. These aerodynamically designed sculptures, ranging in size from monumental to petite, are so ingeniously shaped that they appear created in an art studio rather than by natural forces. Bonsai ponderosa and gnarled old junipers cling to bare rock, greatly enhancing the artwork.

Several years ago, my first visit to the Lybrook Badlands brought astonishment tinged with embarrassment. I'd passed through Lybrook Village on U.S. Hwy. 550 south of Bloomfield numerous times over the years with no inkling that anything like it existed less than a mile from the highway. After many return trips, Lybrook has become my favorite San Juan Basin Badland.

I've been exploring, photographing and writing about north western New Mexico's badlands since first visiting the Bisti Badlands in 1980. I published the first article on the Bisti for a national audience in Sierra magazine in 1982 when the fight to stop the strip mining and have the Bisti declared wilderness was gaining momentum. The Bisti was saved and has since become world renown - I am proud to have contributed.

So, with a little guilt I confess the virtually unknown Lybrook Badlands eclipse the Bisti both in scenic and recreational appeal. Larger in size, Lybrook surpasses the Bisti in the complexity of its multi-level topography, in the variety of hoodoo styles and coloration, and certainly in the beauty of the pygmy conifer forests that add so much color and detail to the hikes. If the Bisti represents an abstract, other worldly dreamscape, then Lybrook is a well-designed, lavishly landscaped sculpture garden. It offers grandeur and rugged cross-country hiking, but also numerous, shaded alcoves and intimate galleries showcasing the smaller-scale statuary and superb trees.

Lybrook's box canyon-riddled mesas drop more than 700 feet in four distinct steps. Carved from San Juan Basin rock layers known to geologists as the Nacimiento Formation, these multicolored sandstone, mudstone and shale layers began forming about 63 million years ago and span 10 million years of earth history. The ancient layers' diversity is responsible for the scenic variety at Lybrook, reflecting the rich environments and biological communities that existed in the San Juan Basin long ago.

The Nacimiento layers began forming during the Paleocene Period in early Tertiary times. The dinosaurs had vanished and early mammals were gaining a foothold in the basin's lush forested floodplains. Erosion from the rapidly rising San Juan Mountains to the north produced huge amounts of sediments transported by rivers and dumped into the basin. The resulting maze of forested river deltas, meandering streams, wetlands, bogs and freshwater lakes left behind plentiful mammal fossils, along with widespread petrified wood caches.

Periodic showers of volcanic ash from the rising San Juan Mountains brought extra silicates and colorful minerals, greatly enriching the ever-thickening deposits that would later become a perfect medium for nature's sculpting prowess. The excellent fossil record at Lybrook shows that mammals were still small and vulnerable. The top predator at the time was a fearsome 10-feet-tall flightless bird with a vicious beak and massive claws called the Diatryma.

The Nacimiento Formation tells a detailed and interesting story about ancient environments, but it's just one chapter from a whole novel written in the 10 sequential sedimentary layers underlying the San Juan Basin. This gentle depression has been collecting sediments for about 160 million years. A few relatively large time gaps interrupt the resulting two-mile-thick sedimentary layer cake, but beginning about 100 million years ago, a nearly continuous record of ancient environments is preserved in the stacked layers, or "formations," up until about 40 million years ago.

The basin didn't take its saucer-like shape until 20 million years ago when widespread faulting, volcanism and uplift along the boundary exposed older, underlying layer edges to the elements and accelerated erosion. One look at a color-coded geologic map presents a clear picture. Warped upward along their perimeters, the exposed, relatively thin layer edges form huge concentric circles with the oldest, bottom layers at the basin's outer reaches and the youngest, topmost layers in the center.

The Nacimiento Formation lies second from the top in the time sequence. Just above it, the most recent, top-most layer, called the San Jose Formation, actually forms a disk at the basin's center. Two formations below and farther out from the center, the Bisti Badlands, are carved from the 70-million-year-old late Cretaceous Kirkland/Fruitland formation deposited when the last of the dinosaurs roamed the shores of a retreating inland sea.

The Lybrook Badland's initial complexity reveals a fairly simple pattern. The stepped tops are formed from tough red and orange sandstone, the sides from more easily eroded, grey mudstone and shale. These two rock types produce two distinct hoodoo types. Those along the sandstone mesa edges are more precisely carved, either into multi-colored, striated domes and hoodoo clusters, or solitary columns, balancing intricate cap rocks. Lower, mono-chromatic mudstone hoodoos grow out from cliff bases like a chaotic garden of alien flora. Formed from raw earth, they have an eerie visceral quality that is almost organic.

Dirt road access off U.S. Hwy. 550 to the badlands' upper edges is short and relatively simple but the cliffs separating the steps complicate long-distance hiking. Easy routes between the levels are limited and difficult to find. Steep-walled box canyons cut the steps into disconnected balconies further complicating cross-country travel. Most hikes involve either strolling the convoluted cliff edges past non-stop sandstone sculptures or getting pleasantly lost in the weird hoodoo mazes along the cliff bases below.

Exploring large portions of the badlands on one hike requires route-finding skills, frequent backtracking and scrambling, some climbing and ample hydration. Long loop hikes are pretty much impossible. However, discovering every natural rock formation seemingly imaginable while wandering this large area makes the effort worthwhile. For quickest access to the most impressive formations, day hikers should choose either the second step from the top or the floor immediately below, depending on which type of hoodoos you want to see. Visitors staying a few days have almost limitless route choices. It would require five or six long hikes just to take a cursory look at the whole area.

The mesa edges not only offer dramatic statuary and stunning views, they also hold some of the most amazing bonsai ponderosa trees I've ever seen. Nowhere is the battle for survival in the high desert more poignant. The closer the trees grow near the edge, the more twisted and stunted they become. Often clawing at the rock and life by just one root, these struggling trees writhe with determination as they test every strategy to postpone inevitable death while their world erodes away. Lightning bolts have scarred many, as if wind, scarce water, bare rock and searing sun don't offer enough challenges.

The ominous hoodoo galleries hold so many strange shapes and exotic textures that their relative lack of coloration is no drawback. Thoroughly exploring this sprawling mudstone labyrinth resembles the challenge of a marathon obstacle course through some weird amusement park. Always use due caution, especially during or after precipitation, when entering the innumerable steep-walled, narrow washes, cavities and overhanging grottos, some towering 50 feet. Cave-ins, small slides, flash floods or falling through thin crust into sink holes present real dangers.

In the larger sandstone box canyons, drainage areas along the cliff bottoms shelter small meadows and huge ponderosa pines, in contrast to their stunted, tormented cousins above. Keep an eye out for wildlife. Mule deer and coyotes roam freely; large raptor numbers indicate robust small mammal and reptile populations.

"Badlands" is a judgmental term from a strictly human point of view. These maligned tracts often have greater species density and diversity than the lands we deem more useful. They also posses an intricate, paradoxical beauty that simultaneously fires the imagination and tickles the funny bone. Art found in the world's finest museums pale in comparison with the art of Lybrook. And you can get a great workout seeing it, along with satisfying servings of exciting cross-county hiking and scrambling.

Albuquerque-based freelance writer Michael Richie enjoys traveling the world for adventure but never tires of exploring New Mexico's high-desert adventure sports.